‘Mark From Gastonia’ became a fixture on WFNZ show. Will he get to call in one more time?

Mark Baker isn’t known as someone who minces words, and true to form — even though he’s still recovering from a major stomach surgery and processing a brand-new cancer diagnosis — he greets a visitor to his ICU room at Gastonia’s CaroMont Regional Medical Center on Monday with sharp blades and an unintentional zinger.

“On some morphine,” he says, chuckling. “I feel kinda lit right now.”

His visitor starts to suggest that maybe he should come back later when Baker is more lucid, but ... it’s too late. The 53-year-old Gastonia man is already insisting his guest swing around so he can show off a couple of videos on his iPhone.

One’s from Mark Packer, host for ESPN’s network devoted to the Atlantic Coast Conference and a long-ago personality on Charlotte sports radio station WFNZ: “Man, I heard you’re not feelin’ too well. Come on, man, let’s go! We got stuff to do! March Madness is right around the corner and we need ya, my man.”

Another’s from former Carolina Panthers star Greg Olsen, now lead color commentator for “NFL on Fox”: “I know things maybe don’t always seem easy or seem fair but just continue to, every day, just keep workin’, man. Keep fightin’, keep pushin’ through.”

Baker’s face beams. “Maaaaaaaan,” he says. “I couldn’t hardly breathe ... when I saw the video.”

Personalized get-well-soon video messages like that would be a dream to any sports superfan battling ailments, but this situation is different. It’s different because Baker isn’t just any ailing sports superfan; he’s the legendary pot-stirrer of a sports superfan well-known to WFNZ’s regular morning-show listers as “Mark From Gastonia,” a — ahem — colorful character who at his peak would call the station’s “Mac & Bone” morning show relentlessly.

And it’s different because, as we mentioned, these aren’t just any ailments.

As recently as a week ago, Baker’s prognosis was so grim that some weren’t sure he’d leave the hospital alive. Since then, he’s made improvements, but even he concedes there’s a reasonable chance he won’t live a whole lot longer.

Then again, “Mark From Gastonia” has outlived expiration dates doctors have put on him before. By more than five decades.

‘Maybe he’ll make it to a year’

Baker, in fact, is not originally from Gastonia but rather Virginia, born into a military family stationed at the time at Fort Lee (now Fort Gregg-Adams) in the city of Petersburg.

Shortly after his birth, his parents were given the devastating news that their new son had two holes in his heart — and told he wouldn’t live to be six months old. When he actually did make it past six months, they were then told, “Maybe he’ll make it to a year,” recalls his mother, Elizabeth Baker. “Well, he made it past that, and then they said ... ‘He will not be able to play like the other children.’”

That turned out to not be an accurate forecast either.

There were certainly major hurdles. At age 5, not long after the family settled in Gastonia, he underwent the terrifying-for-a-young-child experience of having surgery on his heart at Duke University Hospital to repair its holes, followed by a grueling recovery. On top of that, he also had been born with some developmental disabilities, which meant he would go on to be placed in special-education classes after he started school.

But he eventually was indeed able, for all intents and purposes, to play like the other children at Robinson Elementary School and Grier Middle School. By the time he graduated from Ashbrook High School, Baker hadn’t simply stopped worrying about the physical conditions that limited him. He downright refused to.

Says his mom: “He went to the doctor until he was old enough to make his own decisions. After that, you couldn’t get him near a doctor.”

At the same time, you couldn’t keep him away from sports.

How ‘MFG’ became part of FNZ

Despite his parents’ longtime allegiance to Florida State, Mark has been faithful to the University of North Carolina Tar Heels’ basketball and football programs since childhood. He also is an O.G. fan of both the Carolina Panthers and the Charlotte Hornets.

It’s not exactly clear when he started listening to WFNZ, or when he started picking up his phone and calling in to Mark Packer’s 3-to-7 p.m. “Primetime With the Packman,” which aired weekdays from 1997 to 2010 and for many of those years was the Charlotte radio station’s highest-profile show.

Maybe the mid-2000s, best guess?

“But he’s really grown in prominence the last decade or so. I think the rise of social media a little bit has helped him really become more well-known.”

That’s Travis “T-Bone” Hancock talking, and he’s the co-host (along with Chris “Mac” McClain) of 92.7 WFNZ’s “Mac & Bone,” the 6-to-10-a.m.-weekdays show Baker moved on to after Packer left. Over the past decade or so, “Mac & Bone” has helped to elevate “Mark From Gastonia” to near-legend status among its regular listeners.

The radiomen first met Baker, Hancock says, during one in a series of golf outings they were hosting and participating in in 2009.

Baker had already called enough that they recognized his name and voice, but he made an impression for a much wackier reason: He showed up dressed like golf legend Payne Stewart, complete with ivy cap and patterned pants.

“I’m like, ‘What the hell?’’” Hancock recalls, chuckling.

Then some time later, Hancock and McClain were hosting a crowded regular trivia night at Brazwells Pub on Montford when over the course of more than a month they noticed someone I.D.ing themselves as “MFG” kept turning in across-the-board wrong answers. After six straight weeks of this, Hancock got on the mic and demanded to know who “MFG” was. Up popped the dude they’d played nine holes with in 2009.

From there, “it became a love affair with us where he would show up every week, get no questions right, win no prizes, but yet he just wanted to be part of it,” Hancock says.

And in time, he would grow to become one of the show’s most famous callers by way of some strikingly similar antics.

‘Are we taking advantage of this guy?’

“Eeeeeeeeevery day. Aaaaaaaaaalll day,” Baker says when asked how often he called in at the height of his persistence.

He became as notorious for his distinctive Southern drawl as he did for his ridiculous hot takes, which often came in the form of him declaring someone who is definitely not overrated to be highly overrated. Legendary Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski. Fourteen-time NBA All-Star Kevin Durant. Lebron James, first player in NBA history to reach 40,000 career points. At one point or another, Baker has scoffed at them all. Coach K, many times.

“Stir the pot,” he says, grinning. “Every time I call.”

On the air, for the show, McClain and Hancock would howl incredulously. But in reality, they apparently loved it.

“I would be in the car with Mark,” says his longtime close pal Cleo Mayers, also of Gastonia, “and actually he would get a call from the radio station asking him to call in, and he would say, ‘Well, the ratings must be low if they want me to pump up the crowd.’ ... Or we could be in the middle of hanging out and he’d say, ‘Wait a minute, they need me to call in to the radio station.’

Baker also eventually started making daily predictions about games on what was then Twitter, and Hancock says “he would be wrong — unbelievably wrong — every day. It was amazing. There was an “MFG Tracker” Twitter account that someone made that monitored his picks. He went 96 and 358 over three years.”

He also continued to show up at WNFZ-sponsored events hosted by McClain and Hancock, and as Baker became friendlier with them, he gradually shifted from being in the background of these events to being in the foreground.

In time, “Mark From Gastonia’s” face became almost as well-known as his voice among listeners.

It was a huge point of pride for Baker, who says he dreamed of fame as a kid and even as an adult “always wanted to go to Hollywood.” Adds Mayers, a frequent travel companion of Baker’s: “He gets a kick out of all the people knowing him. When we would go on cruises or any vacation, one of the lines he liked to tell people was, ‘I’m a local celebrity.’”

In recent years, “Mac & Bone” even tapped Baker to be its “Panther Friday Pep Talk Guy” to what Hancock says was to bonkers effect: After throwing it over to Baker for the weekly report, Baker would sometimes forget that he was even supposed to talk Panthers.

The co-hosts would laugh and roast him ... and bring him back the next week to do it all over again.

“People would ask, are we taking advantage of this guy?” says Hancock, who over the years has actually become a fairly close personal friend of Baker’s himself. “And I would always get defensive. I’m like, ‘No, he is being included.’ I don’t think that in his life he was always included, because he was seen as different. And I always made sure that people knew: He likes this. He wants people to talk about him. He’s told me that we mean the world to him because he finally felt like he was a part of something.

“So I always made sure, hey, he’ll be a joke of some sorts with us, but he’s in on it.”

Earlier this winter, though, after more than two decades of laughs on WFNZ — and more than three decades of avoiding doctors — Baker’s health took a serious turn.

An ultimatum, then a dire diagnosis

Around Christmastime, Baker began feeling ill, suffering from vomiting and diarrhea.

He refused his mother’s pleas for him to go to the doctor. By January, his overall weight had visibly dropped yet at the same time his stomach appeared to be swelling. He refused Mayers’s urging to see a physician. Mayers could tell Baker was firm on this, so he knew he’d have to be even firmer.

“‘Listen, Mark,’” he remembers telling him. “‘If you don’t go to the doctor and see someone, then we cannot hang out until you do so.’”

Baker finally complied in late January. But the urgent-care physician merely diagnosed him with acid reflux and constipation, prescribed a couple of medications, and sent him home. So when Baker experienced concerning symptoms again about a month later, Mayers again told him to seek medical help, Baker again dug in his heels, and Mayers again gave him an ultimatum.

On Feb. 27, Baker was admitted to the hospital. Things went downhill almost immediately.

In evaluating him, doctors believed he was suffering from a bowel obstruction, but they also determined that Baker’s heart was in a dramatically weakened state. He needed surgery to address his stomach problem, but he also needed to get treatment for his heart condition so he’d be in a position to survive the surgery.

A week later, doctors finally were able to open him up; but in doing so, they discovered his was a much more grave issue: a large, cancerous tumor that is apparently terminal. One that may in fact kill him in just a month or two.

Yet in true “Mark From Gastonia” fashion, Baker has something to say — rather loudly and outrageously — about all this.

‘If he could just call one more time’

“I might get to go home this week, right?” Baker asks a nurse who drops by Monday afternoon to check on in.

“Oh, I’m not making any promises. I know better than that,” she responds, causing him to let out a hearty, healthy laugh. “You’re doing really good, though. You’re doing much, much better than you were three days ago.”

Frequent visits from friends and family have lifted his spirits, he says. So have the get-well-soon videos collected by Hancock, which in addition to Mark Packer and Greg Olsen have also included ones from legendary Florida State quarterback Charlie Ward; Carolina Hurricanes head coach Rod Brind’Amour; University of North Carolina head football coach Mack Brown; and a variety of local TV and radio personalities.

After he arrived at the hospital, he spent days taking things minute by minute. Now, he’s busy making plans.

For one, he’s ready for some real food. “I’m gonna go to Duckworth’s and get something to eat. … They got good nachos. This big. Man. … It’s my favorite restaurant.”

Then, “when I’m healthy,” Baker says, he’s going to start working on a podcast — possibly with his friend Pam DaMoanium, the WFNZ traffic reporter.

He also wants to get a new Polaris Slingshot, a three-wheeled motorcycle, that he says he would have wrapped in a Spider-Man design. (Those who know him will remember he used to have a Batman-themed Slingshot that he’d drive around town while dressed in different costumes.)

But as far as Hancock is concerned, he’d be thrilled to simply have Baker get back on the show again.

“I would like him to be able to call the show one more time,” Hancock says. “I mean, I’m trying to be careful ... I don’t want to say ‘one more time’ and make it seem like he only has one more call left in him. But if he could just call one more time, that would be an incredible story.

“Because that would mean he fought hard enough ... to call one more time.”

Baker smiles when Hancock’s wish is relayed to him, as he reclines in his hospital bed. He predicts it could happen “next week.”

And although his track record for predictions isn’t the greatest, based on his track record for beating the odds in life, who knows? This one might very well wind up proving accurate.

“Today,” Baker says, as he pulls a North Carolina baseball cap onto his head, “is the best I’ve felt in a long time.”